The World's Resources Aren't Running Out

Ecologists worry that the world's resources come in fixed amounts that will run out, but we have broken through such limits again and again

ENLARGE

A worker inspects solar panels in Dunhuang, China. We have an estimated supply of one million years of tellurium, a rare element used in some panels.
Reuters

By

Matt Ridley

April 25, 2014 7:47 p.m. ET

How many times have you heard that we humans are "using up" the world's resources, "running out" of oil, "reaching the limits" of the atmosphere's capacity to cope with pollution or "approaching the carrying capacity" of the land's ability to support a greater population? The assumption behind all such statements is that there is a fixed amount of stuff—metals, oil, clean air, land—and that we risk exhausting it through our consumption.

"We are using 50% more resources than the Earth can sustainably produce, and unless we change course, that number will grow fast—by 2030, even two planets will not be enough," says Jim Leape, director general of the World Wide Fund for Nature International (formerly the World Wildlife Fund).

But here's a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again. After all, as a Saudi oil minister once said, the Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone. Ecologists call this "niche construction"—that people (and indeed some other animals) can create new opportunities for themselves by making their habitats more productive in some way. Agriculture is the classic example of niche construction: We stopped relying on nature's bounty and substituted an artificial and much larger bounty.

Economists call the same phenomenon innovation. What frustrates them about ecologists is the latter's tendency to think in terms of static limits. Ecologists can't seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered, or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along, or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for copper falls.

That frustration is heartily reciprocated. Ecologists think that economists espouse a sort of superstitious magic called "markets" or "prices" to avoid confronting the reality of limits to growth. The easiest way to raise a cheer in a conference of ecologists is to make a rude joke about economists.

ENLARGE

Stephen Webster

More

I have lived among both tribes. I studied various forms of ecology in an academic setting for seven years and then worked at the Economist magazine for eight years. When I was an ecologist (in the academic sense of the word, not the political one, though I also had antinuclear stickers on my car), I very much espoused the carrying-capacity viewpoint—that there were limits to growth. I nowadays lean to the view that there are no limits because we can invent new ways of doing more with less.

This disagreement goes to the heart of many current political issues and explains much about why people disagree about environmental policy. In the climate debate, for example, pessimists see a limit to the atmosphere's capacity to cope with extra carbon dioxide without rapid warming. So a continuing increase in emissions if economic growth continues will eventually accelerate warming to dangerous rates. But optimists see economic growth leading to technological change that would result in the use of lower-carbon energy. That would allow warming to level off long before it does much harm.

It is striking, for example, that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's recent forecast that temperatures would rise by 3.7 to 4.8 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels by 2100 was based on several assumptions: little technological change, an end to the 50-year fall in population growth rates, a tripling (only) of per capita income and not much improvement in the energy efficiency of the economy. Basically, that would mean a world much like today's but with lots more people burning lots more coal and oil, leading to an increase in emissions. Most economists expect a five- or tenfold increase in income, huge changes in technology and an end to population growth by 2100: not so many more people needing much less carbon.

In 1679, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the great Dutch microscopist, estimated that the planet could hold 13.4 billion people, a number that most demographers think we may never reach. Since then, estimates have bounced around between 1 billion and 100 billion, with no sign of converging on an agreed figure.

Economists point out that we keep improving the productivity of each acre of land by applying fertilizer, mechanization, pesticides and irrigation. Further innovation is bound to shift the ceiling upward. Jesse Ausubel at Rockefeller University calculates that the amount of land required to grow a given quantity of food has fallen by 65% over the past 50 years, world-wide.

Ecologists object that these innovations rely on nonrenewable resources, such as oil and gas, or renewable ones that are being used up faster than they are replenished, such as aquifers. So current yields cannot be maintained, let alone improved.

In his recent book "The View from Lazy Point," the ecologist Carl Safina estimates that if everybody had the living standards of Americans, we would need 2.5 Earths because the world's agricultural land just couldn't grow enough food for more than 2.5 billion people at that level of consumption. Harvard emeritus professor E.O. Wilson, one of ecology's patriarchs, reckoned that only if we all turned vegetarian could the world's farms grow enough food to support 10 billion people.

Economists respond by saying that since large parts of the world, especially in Africa, have yet to gain access to fertilizer and modern farming techniques, there is no reason to think that the global land requirements for a given amount of food will cease shrinking any time soon. Indeed, Mr. Ausubel, together with his colleagues Iddo Wernick and Paul Waggoner, came to the startling conclusion that, even with generous assumptions about population growth and growing affluence leading to greater demand for meat and other luxuries, and with ungenerous assumptions about future global yield improvements, we will need less farmland in 2050 than we needed in 2000. (So long, that is, as we don't grow more biofuels on land that could be growing food.)

But surely intensification of yields depends on inputs that may run out? Take water, a commodity that limits the production of food in many places. Estimates made in the 1960s and 1970s of water demand by the year 2000 proved grossly overestimated: The world used half as much water as experts had projected 30 years before.

The reason was greater economy in the use of water by new irrigation techniques. Some countries, such as Israel and Cyprus, have cut water use for irrigation through the use of drip irrigation. Combine these improvements with solar-driven desalination of seawater world-wide, and it is highly unlikely that fresh water will limit human population.

The best-selling book "Limits to Growth," published in 1972 by the Club of Rome (an influential global think tank), argued that we would have bumped our heads against all sorts of ceilings by now, running short of various metals, fuels, minerals and space. Why did it not happen? In a word, technology: better mining techniques, more frugal use of materials, and if scarcity causes price increases, substitution by cheaper material. We use 100 times thinner gold plating on computer connectors than we did 40 years ago. The steel content of cars and buildings keeps on falling.

Until about 10 years ago, it was reasonable to expect that natural gas might run out in a few short decades and oil soon thereafter. If that were to happen, agricultural yields would plummet, and the world would be faced with a stark dilemma: Plow up all the remaining rain forest to grow food, or starve.

But thanks to fracking and the shale revolution, peak oil and gas have been postponed. They will run out one day, but only in the sense that you will run out of Atlantic Ocean one day if you take a rowboat west out of a harbor in Ireland. Just as you are likely to stop rowing long before you bump into Newfoundland, so we may well find cheap substitutes for fossil fuels long before they run out.

The economist and metals dealer Tim Worstall gives the example of tellurium, a key ingredient of some kinds of solar panels. Tellurium is one of the rarest elements in the Earth's crust—one atom per billion. Will it soon run out? Mr. Worstall estimates that there are 120 million tons of it, or a million years' supply altogether. It is sufficiently concentrated in the residues from refining copper ores, called copper slimes, to be worth extracting for a very long time to come. One day, it will also be recycled as old solar panels get cannibalized to make new ones.

Or take phosphorus, an element vital to agricultural fertility. The richest phosphate mines, such as on the island of Nauru in the South Pacific, are all but exhausted. Does that mean the world is running out? No: There are extensive lower grade deposits, and if we get desperate, all the phosphorus atoms put into the ground over past centuries still exist, especially in the mud of estuaries. It's just a matter of concentrating them again.

In 1972, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University came up with a simple formula called IPAT, which stated that the impact of humankind was equal to population multiplied by affluence multiplied again by technology. In other words, the damage done to Earth increases the more people there are, the richer they get and the more technology they have.

Many ecologists still subscribe to this doctrine, which has attained the status of holy writ in ecology. But the past 40 years haven't been kind to it. In many respects, greater affluence and new technology have led to less human impact on the planet, not more. Richer people with new technologies tend not to collect firewood and bushmeat from natural forests; instead, they use electricity and farmed chicken—both of which need much less land. In 2006, Mr. Ausubel calculated that no country with a GDP per head greater than $4,600 has a falling stock of forest (in density as well as in acreage).

Haiti is 98% deforested and literally brown on satellite images, compared with its green, well-forested neighbor, the Dominican Republic. The difference stems from Haiti's poverty, which causes it to rely on charcoal for domestic and industrial energy, whereas the Dominican Republic is wealthy enough to use fossil fuels, subsidizing propane gas for cooking fuel specifically so that people won't cut down forests.

Part of the problem is that the word "consumption" means different things to the two tribes. Ecologists use it to mean "the act of using up a resource"; economists mean "the purchase of goods and services by the public" (both definitions taken from the Oxford dictionary).

But in what sense is water, tellurium or phosphorus "used up" when products made with them are bought by the public? They still exist in the objects themselves or in the environment. Water returns to the environment through sewage and can be reused. Phosphorus gets recycled through compost. Tellurium is in solar panels, which can be recycled. As the economist Thomas Sowell wrote in his 1980 book "Knowledge and Decisions," "Although we speak loosely of 'production,' man neither creates nor destroys matter, but only transforms it."

Given that innovation—or "niche construction"—causes ever more productivity, how do ecologists justify the claim that we are already overdrawn at the planetary bank and would need at least another planet to sustain the lifestyles of 10 billion people at U.S. standards of living?

Examine the calculations done by a group called the Global Footprint Network—a think tank founded by Mathis Wackernagel in Oakland, Calif., and supported by more than 70 international environmental organizations—and it becomes clear. The group assumes that the fossil fuels burned in the pursuit of higher yields must be offset in the future by tree planting on a scale that could soak up the emitted carbon dioxide. A widely used measure of "ecological footprint" simply assumes that 54% of the acreage we need should be devoted to "carbon uptake."

But what if tree planting wasn't the only way to soak up carbon dioxide? Or if trees grew faster when irrigated and fertilized so you needed fewer of them? Or if we cut emissions, as the U.S. has recently done by substituting gas for coal in electricity generation? Or if we tolerated some increase in emissions (which are measurably increasing crop yields, by the way)? Any of these factors could wipe out a huge chunk of the deemed ecological overdraft and put us back in planetary credit.

Helmut Haberl of Klagenfurt University in Austria is a rare example of an ecologist who takes economics seriously. He points out that his fellow ecologists have been using "human appropriation of net primary production"—that is, the percentage of the world's green vegetation eaten or prevented from growing by us and our domestic animals—as an indicator of ecological limits to growth. Some ecologists had begun to argue that we were using half or more of all the greenery on the planet.

This is wrong, says Dr. Haberl, for several reasons. First, the amount appropriated is still fairly low: About 14.2% is eaten by us and our animals, and an additional 9.6% is prevented from growing by goats and buildings, according to his estimates. Second, most economic growth happens without any greater use of biomass. Indeed, human appropriation usually declines as a country industrializes and the harvest grows—as a result of agricultural intensification rather than through plowing more land.

Finally, human activities actually increase the production of green vegetation in natural ecosystems. Fertilizer taken up by crops is carried into forests and rivers by wild birds and animals, where it boosts yields of wild vegetation too (sometimes too much, causing algal blooms in water). In places like the Nile delta, wild ecosystems are more productive than they would be without human intervention, despite the fact that much of the land is used for growing human food.

If I could have one wish for the Earth's environment, it would be to bring together the two tribes—to convene a grand powwow of ecologists and economists. I would pose them this simple question and not let them leave the room until they had answered it: How can innovation improve the environment?

Mr. Ridley is the author of "The Rational Optimist" and a member of the British House of Lords.

I've read much of Mr. Ridley's work. Here he makes an assumption that human innovation and adjustment can overcome almost anything. I would suggest that what we can't overcome is something that we don't see or refuse to see until it is too late.

Clearly climate change is already occurring at a significant enough rate to merit consideration in the Pentagon's Quadrennial report. That's a pretty serious statement. We better acknowledge the damage we have done and are doing before it is too late to innovate and adjust our way out of the consequences.

I do believe we can and will adjust to what we see coming once we see it and acknowledge it. As in economics, we must be willing and able. I believe we are or will be able. I'm not sure we are quite willing yet. Clearly some are having a hard time acknowledging any limits. I hope we will adjust soon enough to avoid massive disruptions to civilization, but I am not convinced. I do think it is best to err on the side of caution.

It's great to point out how the private sector has continuously innovated to break through supposedly hard limits in our resources. There's a reason they've innovated: the profit incentive. But without government intervention, this model breaks down when it comes to preserving our atmosphere. Corporations currently have no incentive to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and therefore will not innovate.

If we want to preserve our environment, we actually have to act collectively -- as Franklin said, we all have to hang together, or else... This collective action should take advantage of the private sector's ability to innovate: we should institute market-based measures such as a carbon tax that will drive the innovation necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Matt, what you say is clear to me as an economist. As for bringing ecologists and economists together, Australia's Hawke government tried that in the 1980s, when I was an economic policy adviser to the PM. Several economists I knew were keen on the idea, and joined the new body intended to provide comprehensive advice on environmental issues. All were disillusioned - none of the environmentalists would accept that the economic approach had any validity, they were totally closed to it. When in 1989-90 I broached the issue of economists having a role in dealing with issues such as alleged CAGW, physicist Ian Lowe, later a darling of the Green Left and go-to man for left-wing pollies and most media, publicly abused and vilified me. I haven't seen much advance since.

Julian Simon in The Ultimate Resource: People, Materials and the Environment taught us the important lesson that human innovation in response to prices explains the world’s data far better than the “Chicken Little” view that we live in a finite resource world. That does not mean we should be unconcerned about the environment; rather it means that we should be as informed as possible about how things work and how to enable human betterment.

Julian started out investigating the problem of overpopulation only to learn that people also were the solution.

Bjorn Lomberg was a Danish ecologist who thought Simon’s book surely must be wrong; set out with his graduate students to prove it, but ended up finding that he was mostly right. It’s not often that people, both Simon and Lomberg, change their views by reviewing the evidence. Bjorn has gone on to establish himself as an important independent thinker on environmental issues.

Thanks to Matt Ridley for updating and spotlighting these important principles.

"Reading Eagle, Sep 8, 1936, pg 1, Scientist Harnesses Sun Rays to Generate Power, Washington, Sep 8 (AP)—A “solar motor” driving a tiny steam engine with no fuel but the sun’s rays, was hailed today by delegates to the third world power conference as the key to an almost unlimited treasure hours of energy….It was examined with intense interest by cabinet ministers, scientists, and industrialists from 32 nations, who opened their sessions yesterday with a blunt warning that the end of some other power resources – particularly petroleum—is already in sight.The 3,000 delegates, settling down to a week-long analysis of the world’s output and distribution of energy, gave special attention to gas and electric utilities.Although Dr. Abbot’s demonstration machine turned an engine of only one-half horsepower, he declared the same principle could be used on a vast scale. If oil and coal supplies fail, he predicted, sun motors…His guests at the demonstration mentioned the possibility of giant installations in deserts, converting the sun’s energy into electricity to serve distant cities."

Thank god the oil companies are all communist and would never consider enriching themselves or making poor people's energy costs go up. Thank goodness that such sweet, caring corporate citizens control 36% of our energy supplies, so that those darn ecoslimes can't control the market.

You should look up "progressive" and "conservative" in the dictionary.

Progressives believe that we can work together and use science and technology to improve our lot. Conservatives believe that cooperation is communist and that we should all go back to the hunter-gather societies we lived in before there were governments.

@eric nelsonAh yes. History teaches us that whenever a common exists, the best approach to maximize profits over a long period of time is to ensure that there are no regulations that might create a fair market. Everyone should just use as much of the commons as possible to maximize short term profits before the commons is destroyed and produces no more profits for anyone.

Oh right. Because most of the innovations over the past 100,000 years occurred in hunter-gatherer societies that had essentially no government. Innovation pretty much stopped 10,000 years ago when farmers started to create states.

No doubt Ferrari will fail imminently due to the fact that it doesn't market to the masses.

Oh my, solar power doesn't work well in the arctic. That must mean it doesn't work anywhere well. Gosh darn the government for once again choosing the least useful technology to power the orbiting ISS.

My friends learned how to reason based on facts in the appropriate context. Others have learned the facts and can sometimes even reason with them, but haven't figured out that conclusions can vary based on the context.

"fossil fuels out will inevitably run out"fossil fuels are mostly made out of carbon and hydrogen. As long as fossil fuels are useful and as long as there is carbon and hydrogen, we will not run out of fossil fuels.

Progress on alternatives to fossil fuels have been excruciatingly slow because fossil fuels are cheap and the alternative technologies are hard. We can assume the breakthroughs will be achieved because we have existence proofs that alternatives work. Olive oil exists. Canola oil exists. Bacteria that manufacture methane exist. All of these things evolved. Humans have consistently proved quite adept on designing specific improvements to evolved things.

Also, we know that the alternatives don't work at $100/barrel, and we are absolutely certain we have alternatives that do work at $1,000/barrel. So now it's just a matter of waiting for the price to rise high enough and to fine tune the manufacturing processes and volumes to get the prices to meet up.

What a remarkably short-sighted article! The Stone Age didn't end due to a lack of stone? Really??!!! Must be nice to be a "Lord" and not have to worry about the little things causing problems for the little people...Of course I did not see any suggestions where the world might find unfound deposits of fossil fuels; and of course, since those fossil fuels were the result of plant life transforming its carbon into oil deposits because there were no systems to break down cellulose four billion years ago (when the atmosphere could not break it down so when a tree fell, it just laid there), ultimately these depositories of atmospheric carbon transformed into the "oil" we know today. There will not be another Carboniferous Period, certainly not until we turn the atmosphere back into sulfur sludge and methane - and when that happens unless we have evolved into creatures unrecognizable as humans, it won't do us a darned bit of good. All of which is to say, now that funguses and microbes eat up our trees long before they get buried to turn into sludge, the fossil fuel deposits we have are IT for the long haul. And that is just one thing wrong with this article. It's nice to be "optimistic", but it is foolish to be fantastical!

@LaVerne Wheeler The point is that, by the time fossil fuels are truly about to run out, we'll already have better alternative sources of energy. If fossil fuels last only a few centuries, that will be plenty of time. I don't think you understood the article.

Wow what a fact-free, feel-good take on resource depletion. The British Lord here nullifies all scientific and environmental research with the saying "The stone age didn't end due to a lack of stone."

If the author had included a few graphs, one could easily see a visual depiction of our shredding of the world's ecosystems. Our callous disregard for the environment has already caused major damage and death, and will collapse our entire species if we don't change our course. We already cause genocide to over one hundred animal species per year.

He compares our headroom in regards to fossil fuels as the amount of water between Ireland and America in a rowboat. Well, perhaps if your rowboat were the size of Russia that would be an accurate analogy.

The author presents technological innovation as a panacea, but he never even mentions any of the downsides of industrial mechanization. For example he heralds industrial fertilizers as our food-savior, but neglects to mention the Dust Bowl in the U.S. which was due to over-fertilizing and over-farming, nor does he mention the massive ocean dead-zones where we have killed all life around the exits from rivers due to industrial and especially agricultural run-off. Nor does he mention new fertilizer-based farming techniques driven by China's spectacular rate of growth which has already poisoned around 15% of their farmland, making it unusable. Nor does he mention the periodic industrial catastrophes (Bhopal, Fukushima, Deep Sea Horizon, etc.) or the incessant stream of spills and explosions that happen every day but don't reach the national news. And he does not mention in his rosy outlook the recent finding that 9 huge corporate global fisheries throw half, yes half, of their catch back into the ocean, dead. These dead animals include dolphins, whales, and other amphibians and mammals that were caught up in their gigantic nets.

There is a new and dangerously recurring tendency in the political and especially business community to respond to inconvenient problematic facts not by addressing the root-causes of the problems, nor even by band-aiding them, but instead to wish away the problem as if it doesn't even exist. Common sense tells us that we live on a finite planet which is more and more densely populated with humans living a Western lifestyle of consumption. Common sense, and facts, and science also tell us that we are causing a global greenhouse effect.

Now, we may be able to respond to these problems. In fact I actually agree with the potential for optimism like the author, but NOT if we DON'T TAKE THE NECESSARY STEPS.

We are not expanding National R&D which could find technological solutions to these problems, we are cutting it. We are not properly funding any of the research that we could use to attempt to address these problems, and we can never summon the political will to do so if people keep reading propaganda pieces like this which are published because businesses are too greedy to finance the small surcharge it would cost to balance the free externalities they currently enjoy by dumping their pollution into the environment.

@Jordan Brinkman Good point--- while the article focuses only on "using up" natural resources, it does not mention the damage done to plant and animal life.

However, when you say that they're just wishing the problem away as if it doesn't exist so as to avoid taking the necessary "steps" to address the problem, I think you missed the fundamental point of the article. The point is that in the absence of some initiative by the national government, we aren't necessarily left on the same "course." The point is that the economics of energy and efficiency are constantly evolving and advancing. We are not left on some "course" that can be extrapolated into the future to argue that we will run out of such-and-such resource by this point or we'll need such-and-such amount of space/resources to sustain our lifestyles. Thus it would be absurd to attempt to draw any meaningful conclusions from some sort of graph that limits us to a trajectory based on the current economic landscape.

Glad you started the conversation, but your concluding question I feel is rather insufficient.

Your final provocative question “How can innovation improve the environment?”, I think it goes in the right direction, but needs to be reformulated a little bit.

Yes innovation and scientific discovery may be our most valuable resource, hopefully one that really should never run out.

One of the key aspects of harvesting the dividends of innovation for the benefit of the Earth and the whole of humanity needs to be to focus in on exactly the correct questions to ask, since that is what drives us forward.

Instead of “How can innovation improve the environment?” How about “How can innovation be captured for the benefit of the Earth’s environment and the whole of humanity?

Here is where we can use some real innovation from the economics profession, where dare I say some blind spots in innovation have kept us acting rather uncivilized.

Specifically, under our current world economic system, innovation is only driven so far, and mostly so long as it is constructed to preserve the current economic order, providing maximum return to existing wealth structures: return on capital.

As long as there is little innovation from the economics and business theory to provide incentive for activities for the benefit for the Earth and the whole of humanity, then I think your final question is wholly insufficient to get us to where we need to go.

Until real innovation occurs in the human affairs of how economics is actually practiced, I think we will only be able to continue to live with a damaged, sub-optimal environment.

@john bangstonNo, another driver does not pay the alleged $7500 subsidy on a Tesla. A quick internet search suggests Tesla has sold fewer than 10,000 autos over its lifetime. That $75 million dollars makes this a fairly small research project. Kinda pales compared to the $5,000 million dollars we spend *per year* on researching cancer. Meanwhile, there's something like 14 million cars and light trucks sold per year. That's 14,000 drivers banding together to pay $7500 subsidy on one Tesla. Which is just over 50 cents per driver. Gosh, that's such a shocking, shocking! abuse of other drivers.

@david knightRight, that's fair. Let's take a well established technology that has been developed and refined for a century or more and require that any promising new technology be cheaper on the first day it emerges from the lab before any economies of scale can take effect to reduce its prices.

Gosh, maybe if we want all that innovation and technology that this blog posting promises us, perhaps we should nourish diverse energy sources and do research, and then do early stage development on the most promising ones, so that, over the long run, including the early stage research and development we end up with more economical sources of energy.

@Chet Esium Your strawman lacks a target. No one says "we" should require any new technology to be cheaper than current technologies on the first day it emerges. Plus that's the opposite of what happens in reality anyway. Both you and the people you wish to attach that strawman to know this. But it's irrelevant

I know. The ecologists really screwed up when they said catalytic converters could improve the air in L.A. And the ecologists helping to create a market for sulfur-dioxide emissions to reduce acid rain? Total failure. And Love Canal... Don't even get me started on how badly the ecologists screwed that one up.

For most of us, we drive to work and back about 5 days a week, and we drive a range easily covered by an electric battery so that we can either recharge at home or recharge on the company's dime in the company parking lot. We would take a long distance trip much less frequently and would use a different vehicle. Even though we can't use the electric vehicle for all our trips, we can still be much more environmentally friendly for half of our trips.

"Oh if you can't solve all of the problems in the world, you aren't allowed to solve any of them. Whine, whine."

Man is not suicidal when a proper market exists. Fish are a globally unregulated commons. In an unregulated commons, the second best strategy is to get as much as you can as fast as you can before the commons is destroyed. The best strategy is to regulate the commons in a sustainable fashion.

So we can stop eating fish, which was a cheap and diverse source of protein. Or we can create a market, that is, we can regulate the commons, in order to keep the supply of fish from disappearing.

Solar accounts for something like 0.2% of our electricity supply. Intermittency does not matter today. Now give it ten or fifteen years when solar is providing 10% of our electricity supply. If intermittency is still a problem, we can stop deploying solar then. In the meantime, solar prices will have dropped to nearly a quarter of what they are now, electric cars that can mostly recharge when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing will be a lot more widespread, and different kinds of technology to store excess electricity and release it when needed will be better developed.

"Ecologists think that economists espouse a sort of superstitious magic called "markets" or "prices" to avoid confronting the reality of limits to growth."

Yes, there are markets and prices for commodities, and as we approachthe limits of a commodity, the price rises and drives innovation touse less (e.g. we stopped burning oil to produce electricity), or findsubstitutes, or to develop new sources.

But where exactly is the market for clean air? I don't remember going downto the corner store recently to buy my weekly allotment of breathable air.Thank goodness we have ecologists pushing for strong regulations to keepthe air in California mostly breathable. Too bad Beijing doesn't havemore ecologists or stronger environmental regulations. Thank goodnessecologists pushed for the creation of a market for sulpher emissions so thatprice signals could develop technology to reduce acid rain.

Where is the market for coral reefs that discourages carbon dioxide emissionsfrom acidifying the oceans? Our global fisheries are a commons. Where isthe market that encourages fishermen to not overfish? Where is the marketfor Sacramento river delta smelt?

Yes, when you have markets and prices, they work well. When you don't havemarkets and prices, ecologists can be quite effective at creating markets.Ecologists would love to create a market for releasing carbon-dioxide into theshared commons that is our atmosphere.

The fact that natural gas generated electrictiy has displaced some coalgenerated electricity is fortuitous. But that kind of unplanned good fortunecannot be depended on. We found new gas supplies because the price of naturalgas was high, not because the price of carbon in our atmospheres was high.Depending on ecologists pushing for technological improvements to the fuelefficiency of our cars is a better approach.

Ecologists are also quite good at pointing out where issues are going to ariseso that technology can explore a variety of paths for addressing the issue.Ecologists offer a choice: you can figure out how to reduce carbon emissionsfrom coal-fired power plants today, or you can figure out how to build a levyaround Florida over the next 50 years, or you can figure out how to move theentire population of Florida to higher ground over the next 50 years. Pickthe one that's cheapest.

Just because we can develop technology when properly motivated and aware of thelimits that we need to address doesn't mean that we will develop technologywhen the motivation is actively blocked by deniers or the vision is notwell developed and communicated.

Mr. Ridley has a seemingly blind faith in technology solving most, if not all, of our problems. History shows that the application of technology causes at least as many problems as it solves. Already, we are seeing crop yields flattening out due to the over-application of a witch's brew of herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, and fertilizers.

Sorry Jeff but the website you referenced is not being honest with their numbers. I am an Electrical Engineer in CA and I have designed many solar installations and I can tell you they are great, they are getting more popular, but they are still no where as cheap as coal power. Currently the power sources in terms of cost per kWh generated are ranked *** keep in mind this is taking thing like permits, building costs, maintenance, etc. into consideration: (1) Coal (2) IGCC (3) Natural Gas (4) Nuclear (5) Geothermal (6) Hydro ... (7) Wind (8) Solar. I placed '...' between (6) and (7) because there is a huge jump in costs when you move towards Solar and Wind.

Post a link to your sources, Albert. The fact that you are an Electrical Engineer in CA in no way provides evidence that you know what you are talking about. The EIA pretty strongly disagrees with you.http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfmTheir order is: geothermal, natural gas, wind, hydro, coal, nuclear, biomass, natural gas, igcc, natural gas, solar pv, igcc, offshore wind, solar thermalAnd they aren't taking into account the cost of water to cool the turbines; a cost not borne by wind and solar; a cost that is increasingly important in the parched southwest.

One of the richest men in the world is at this very moment building a giant battery factory with the intention that many of those batteries will be used for "load time shifting", which means the owner (home, company, school) will buy electricity at night when demand (and the price) is lower, and use it during high-load (more expensive) hours, which will save the owner money, and reduce peak loads on our grid.

Those very same batteries can be used to store solar power for use during the night ... though it actually makes more sense to "lend" the power to your neighbor during peak load hours, so that the dirtier, less efficient "peaker" plants do not need to be used to supply your neighbor while you store your clean energy in a battery. Your neighbor then pays you back with night time energy, which is less polluting than peak hour energy, (which is what he would have used without his helpful solar neighbor).

There is seldom in any argument one side that is absolutely and completely wrong and the other absolutely and completely right. Conservation makes sense, as history is also filled with grim tales of brutal audits when civilizations exhausted their resources. And it is from the grim and horrible tales that often man has innovated in order to persist. But man has only been around on the 4 billion year old rock for a few hundred thousand years. That is the blink of an eye in cosmological time frames. Don't get cocky thinking we can't turn this wonderful place into something as barren as Mars if we allow greed to run amuck which market forces have never been able to corral. When it comes to greed, people are very short sighted and want to get theirs now, with little concern for the future. We shouldn't take the gamble that future generations will be able to clean up the mess we make, just because past generations have had to labor at that burden when greedy fools said the oceans, rivers, air and soil were SO VAST they could never fill up with all the waste from their profits.

Your comment ignores reality. Betting one way has risks, but betting the other way has risks also.

For example. In 1890, the conservationists had proof that we would have to shut down much of the nation's rail system because the railroad ties were rotting faster than forests could regrow them.

By 1915 a cheap preservative had been invented and is still in use with railroad ties and phone poles.

Had we failed to press ahead, the industrial revolution would have been brought to a screeching halt. The improved life expectancy, the reduce infant mortality, the improved literacy, the improved, standard of living for the masses, the massive improvement in our nation's libraries, and other improvements would have not happened.

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.